about

"This trio has played together a lot over the years, except we didn't play my music.We were all semi-regular members of the Mingus Big Band and even more so the Mingus Dynasty. Every time we did a tour, I though to myself, " wow , I would love to play some of my music with this trio configuration.'

Thankfully, Tokyo based jazz promoter Kohei Kawakami made it possible with a 10 day stint. From the first gig to the last, we really hit it off, musically and personally. I'm very much looking forward to the next tour which is October 2009! Just a note about the music. With the exception of Come Together and The Shadow of Your Smile, these are all my compositions. While this is essentially an acoustic jazz piano trio CD, there are a lot of elements at play. There's some funkiness, bluesy-ness, bebop, fusion, MBase (look it up if you are not familiar), ballads, fusion, classical influence, polytonality, and just a lot of enthusiasm and energy. While the actual recording time was very brief (I think we were there five hours, taking an hour for lunch), the time that I, Boris, and Donald have put into learning our instruments, and learning how to play music, has been a lifetime. So please, do us a favor and take your time listening to it. You might not get it all on the first go round. It might take 2 listens to hear our lifetimes of musical development!"